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Ruth, who is double majoring in Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Physics, was first licensed in June 2015. On her QRZ page she says:

“I love getting on the air on amateur radio satellites! I have operated from a number of grid squares in Georgia, Michigan, Virginia, and more. I am enjoying the challenge of balancing two radios and an arrow antenna, changing frequencies, and trying to talk on the satellite and remember callsigns at the same time! The more passes I do, the more I learn, and I am having a ton of fun. I started out on FM satellites only, and am slowly learning how to do linear satellites as well.”

The university article reports:

She has found that the skills she learns in classes go hand in hand with her amateur radio hobby. Willet plans to start up an Amateur Radio Club on campus in the spring 2018 term to get more students interested.

“I really enjoy sharing this hobby with other students,” she said. “I would encourage people to consider exploring amateur radio because it’s a hobby that allows you to explore anything from technical electronics to international friendships. Amateur radio is open to anyone. It will help develop your professional and personal skills, participate in and learn from fascinating activities, and connect with an incredible community.”

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David Johnson G4DPZ has announced that his AmsatDroidFree satellite tracking App for Android devices is now open source.

This App predicts future passes for amateur radio satellites for a specified location and period of time.

Basic features:
– Calculate passes for up to the next 24 hours
– Graphical pass display
– Map view showing current satellite position and next two orbits
– Update keps from a file on SD card or directly from AMSAT’s webpage using your phone’s internet connection
– Set home coordinates from User Input (Lat, Lon, Grid Square), Network or GPS

On the 03:25 UTC pass on January 26, 2018, AMSAT Vice President Engineering Jerry Buxton, N0JY, announced that AO-92 had been commissioned and formally turned the satellite over to AMSAT Operations. AMSAT Vice President – Operations Drew Glasbrenner, KO4MA, then declared that AO-92 was now open for amateur use.

Initially, the U/v FM transponder will be open continuously for a period of one week. After the first week, operations will be scheduled between the U/v FM transponder, L-Band Downshifter, Virginia Tech Camera, and the University of Iowa’s High Energy Radiation CubeSat Instrument (HERCI).

Schedule updates will appear in the AMSAT News Service Weekly Bulletins and will also be posted to the AMSAT-BB, AMSAT’s Twitter account (@AMSAT), the AMSAT North America Facebook group, and the AMSAT website at https://www.amsat.org/satellite-schedules/

AO-92 was launched on the PSLV-C40 mission from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India on January 12, 2018. For the past two weeks, the AMSAT Engineering and Operations teams have been testing the various modes and experiments on board. Testing has shown that both the U/v FM transponder and L-Band Downshifter work very well. The Virginia Tech camera has returned stunning photos and data from HERCI has been successfully downlinked.

AMSAT thanks the 178 stations worldwide that have used FoxTelem to collect telemetry and experiment data from AO-92 during the commissioning process. The collection of this data is crucial to the missions of AMSAT’s Fox-1 satellites. Please continue to collect data from AO-85, AO-91, and AO-92.

The CubeSat PicSat carrying an amateur radio FM transponder was launched on the same PSLV-C40 flight from India that delivered AO-92 to orbit.

PicSat is a nano-satellite aimed at observing the transit of the young exoplanet Beta Pictoris b in front of its bright and equally young star Beta Pictoris, and at demonstrating an innovative technological concept to use optical fibres for astronomical observations from Space.

The CubeSat contains an embedded FM transponder. It will be available when possible during the mission.

This week the PicSat team requested amateur radio assistance to capture and upload telemetry packets from the satellite. Beacons received from all over the world are especially useful to monitor the status of satellite along its orbit (and not just when it is above our own station). Science data are obviously useful for the science mission. And all other packets, even when they do not look like much, can be of great importance! For example, we often receive satellite acknowledgements to our commands from ground station in France or Europe which are listening at the same time as us. It may look useless, but it is not. We regularly miss those packets ourselves, so it is good to have other people receiving them and sending
them to us.

+ Fast upload beacon: mainly intended as a way to directly upload a beacon by copy/paste when you receive, and to get an immediate overview of the satellite status. When you are a new user, this is also the only way you can upload a packet. Upload one beacon successfully, and you will have access to the other methods!

This page accepts a hexadecimal string, like “0123456789ABCDEF” in which whitespaces and upper/lower case are ignored (“01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef”, or even something like “0 1 234 56789 aBc dEf” will be accepted). The hexadecimal string must represent the AX.25 packet (without flags), possibly KISS encapsulated (starting with “C0 00” and ending with “C0”)

+ Upload data: this can be used to upload files containing multiple packets at once. The files are stored on our servers, and processed daily.

+ SiDS requests: This will be implemented in the near future.

PicSat shares a similar orbit with AO-92 since they were both deployed at approximately the same time. PicSat has been included in the 2 line Keplerian Elements distributions. On-line orbit predications for PicSat can be found at https://picsat.obspm.fr/operations/orbital-map?locale=en

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Some of the students from Huai’an who helped develop the Zhou Enlai CubeSat

The 2U CubeSat Zhou Enlai 周恩来 developed with primary and middle school students was launched at 04:12 UT on Friday, January 19, 2018. 26 delegates from the satellite development student team in Huai’an who helped develop the CubeSat were at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center for the launch.

The satellite is named after the first Premier of the PRC, Zhou Enlai, who was born in Huai’an and held office from October 1949 until January 1976.

Also on the launch were the 6U CubeSats Xiaoxiang-2 (TY-2) and Yizhuang QuanTuTong-1 (QTT 1 / TY-6) developed by TianYi Research Institute in Changsha, Hunan Province, also known as SPACETY. TY-2 carries four experiments, testing optical fiber sensing technology, space radio software, Amateur Radio and image stabilization while TY-6 carries navigation and communication payloads (including AIS) along with the Amateur Radio payload. TY2 and TY6 both operate in the 435, 2400, 5650 and 5830 MHz amateur satellite service bands, further information at http://www.amsatuk.me.uk/iaru/finished_detail.php?serialnum=556

The satellite was sent from its production base in Huai’an Youth Comprehensive Development Base in east China’s Jiangsu Province to Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gansu Province Monday, where a CZ-11 solid fuel rocket is scheduled to put it into orbit Friday.

Twenty teenagers who participated in the development project accompanied the transport group to the launch center and will witness the lift-off.

Zhang Xiang, chief designer of the satellite, said that the nano-satellite, weighing 2 kilograms, is set to run in sun-synchronous orbit. Equipped with a HD optical camera, it can capture space photos with the highest resolution among those shot by other Chinese satellites for scientific education purpose.

Zhang said that the students had taken their spare time to join the development and groundbased simulation performance of the satellite, and had learnt to assemble and practice voice data transfer and telecommunication applications.

“A scientific satellite like this is like a teacher in space, carrying cameras or spectroscopes to study the upper atmosphere or to shoot space pictures of the stars. Students can grasp the mystery of the universe through the messages transmitted by the teacher,” said Zhang, a professor with Nanjing University of Science and Engineering.